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98.Usually, such specialised health care is not considered R&D, and all medical care not directly linked to a specific R&D project should be excluded from the R&D statistics.

Personal education of academic staff

99.This activity covers time spent on activities such as continued professional learning (“own reading”), attendance at conferences and seminars, etc.

100.In distinguishing R&D from related activities, the question of whether “own reading” should be included as part of R&D activities is often raised. It is certainly part of the general professional development of research staff and, in the long term, the knowledge and experience gained are incorporated into the researcher’s thinking about, if not into the actual implementation of, R&D. Own reading, in fact, constitutes a cumulative process, and when the information gained from this activity is translated into research activity, it will be measured as R&D.

101.Only personal education carried out specifically for a research project should be considered as an R&D activity.

2.3.3. Problems at the borderline between R&D and related scientific and technological activities

General approach

102. Difficulties for separating R&D from other scientific and technological activities arise when several activities are performed at the same institution. In survey practice, using rules of thumb to make distinctions facilitates the identification of the R&D portion. For example:

–Institutions or units of institutions and firms whose principal activity is R&D often have secondary, non-R&D activities (e.g. scientific and technical information, testing, quality control, analysis). Insofar as a secondary activity is undertaken primarily in the interests of R&D, it should be included in R&D activities; if the secondary activity is designed essentially to meet needs other than R&D, it should be excluded.

–Institutions whose main purpose is an R&D-related scientific activity often undertake some research in connection with this activity. Such research should be isolated and included when measuring R&D.

103.The following examples illustrate the use of such rules of thumb:

–The activities of a scientific and technical information service or of a research laboratory library, maintained predominantly for the benefit of the research workers in the laboratory, should be included in R&D. The activities of a firm’s documentation centre open to all the firm’s staff should

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be excluded from R&D even if it shares the same premises as the company research unit. Similarly, the activities of central university libraries should be excluded from R&D. These criteria only apply when it is necessary to exclude the activities of an institution or a department in their entirety. Where more detailed accounting methods are used, it may be possible to impute part of the costs of the excluded activities to R&D overheads. Whereas the preparation of scientific and technical publications is, generally speaking, excluded, the preparation of the original report of research findings should be included in R&D.

–Public bodies and consumer organisations often operate laboratories whose main purpose is testing and standardisation. The staff of these laboratories may also spend time devising new or substantially improved methods of testing. Such activities should be included in R&D.

–General-purpose data collection is particularly important to social science research, since without it many aspects of this research would not be feasible. However, unless it is collected primarily for research purposes, it should not be classified as a research activity. On the other hand, the larger statistical institutes may carry out some R&D (e.g. conceptual and methodological work in relation to the development of completely new or substantially modified surveys and statistical systems, work on sampling methodologies, small area statistical estimates). Whenever possible, such R&D should be included.

Specific cases

104.In certain cases, the theoretical criteria for distinguishing between R&D and related scientific and technological activities are particularly difficult to apply. Space exploration, mining and prospecting and the development of social systems are three areas involving large amounts of resources, and any variations in their treatment will have important effects on the international comparability of the resulting R&D data. Large-scale projects also pose problems for the definition of their R&D; these are discussed in Section 2.3.4. The following conventions apply in the four areas mentioned.

•Space exploration

105.The difficulty with space exploration is that, in some respects, much space activity may now be considered routine; certainly, most costs are incurred for the purchase of goods and services which are not R&D. However, the object of all space exploration is still to increase the stock of knowledge, so that it should all be included in R&D. It may be necessary to separate the activities associated with space exploration, including the development of vehicles, equipment and techniques, from those involved in the routine placing of orbiting satellites or the establishment of tracking and communication stations.

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•Mining and prospecting

106.Mining and prospecting sometimes cause problems owing to a linguistic confusion between research for new or substantially improved resources (food, energy, etc.) and the search for existing reserves of natural resources, a confusion which blurs the distinction between R&D and surveying and prospecting. In theory, in order to establish accurate R&D data, the following activities should be identified, measured and summed:

–The development of new surveying methods and techniques.

–Surveying undertaken as an integral part of a research project on geological phenomena.

–Research on geological phenomena per se, undertaken as a subsidiary part of surveying and prospecting programmes.

107. In practice, the last of these presents a number of problems. It is difficult to frame a precise definition that would be meaningful to respondents to national surveys. For this reason, only the following activities should be included in R&D:

–The development of new or substantially improved methods and equipment for data acquisition and for the processing and study of the data collected and for the interpretation of these data.

–Surveying undertaken as an integral part of an R&D project on geological phenomena per se, including data acquisition, processing and interpretation undertaken for primarily scientific purposes.

108.It follows that the surveying and prospecting activities of commercial companies will be almost entirely excluded from R&D. For example, the sinking of exploratory wells to evaluate the resources of a deposit should be considered as scientific and technological services.

•The development of social systems

109.In general, but more particularly in the field of the social sciences, the purpose of a study is to prepare the way for decisions by policy makers at the level of government (central, regional, local) or in industrial and trading enterprises. Usually, such studies employ established methodologies, but it is sometimes necessary to modify existing methodologies or to develop new ones. This requires an appreciable amount of research. In theory, such modification or development should be included in R&D, but one must be aware of the difficulties involved in evaluating the appropriate share of R&D in a given study. In practice, despite the technical and conceptual problems, it may be feasible either to assign studies which include an appreciable element of novelty entirely to research or to attempt to estimate the proportion of research in those studies and attribute this to R&D (see also Section 2.4.2). For

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